Many were dressed in traditional Kurdish clothing _ baggy jumpsuits, wide cloth belts and colorful turbans _ and they carried an assortment of Russian-made assault rifles of 1970s vintage. One man, a professionally dressed volunteer from Irbil, carried a newer looking American-made M-16.

They face Daash/ISIS forces that have lots of weapons the US sold to the Baghdad government.

an enemy better equipped with heavy weapons it had recently looted from captured Iraqi arsenals.

The Kurds are therefore fighting against American armored vehicles which ISIS captured from the Iraqi Army. US F/A-18 jets are flying sorties to destroy American-built weapons that are in the hands of ISIS. If the US had given those weapons to the Kurds instead the weapons would still be in friendly hands and not being used to commit genocide. The Kurds would be able to use those superior weapons and much larger stocks of ammo to fight against a group that is dedicated to genocide against Shiites, Yazidi, and Christians.

The Kurds were outgunned in Sinjar. The United States could have supplied the Kurds with heavy weapons as soon as ISIS began their rampage back in June and prevented the current tragedy.

ISIS had launched its attack on Sinjar during the night. Peshmerga militiamen were outgunned—their assault rifles against the extremists’ captured fifty-caliber guns, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, anti-aircraft weapons, and armored vehicles. The Kurds began to run out of ammunition, and those who could retreated north toward Kurdistan.

The US government's State Department, National Security Council, and other organs of foreign and defense policy have enormous staffs with elite educations. Yet the US government is quite lame at conducting foreign policy.

Some of the US lameness is due to Barack Obama. He doesn't seem to have much interest in foreign policy. Plus his sympathies make him ill-suited to use

Part of US foreign policy lameness comes from the fact that the US government is a government. Governments are not very efficient. But also the US has been so powerful for so long that policy makers are complacent. Plus, the American elite look at the world with a mythology about humanity that is quite distant from the truth. They don't want to appreciate the power of tribal bonds in a society where cousin marriage is widespread and where loyalty to the state is weak and will remain that way. Plus, the idea that a religion can be incompatible with liberal democracy is just not something that the DC elite wants to admit to. So we're ruled by people with massive delusions who need to see things going really bad for months before they'll act.

I do not see how US policy makers can sustain a policy of containment against the Islamic Jihadists and the culture that supports them when it is taboo to accurately describe the nature of the conflict. The Cold War against communism was far easier to manage and sustain because the enemy could be identified clearly.

Have you read Obama's 2002 speech opposing the Iraq war? It was not lame and it was far more accurate in anticipating what a mess Iraq would become then what the neocons pushing for war predicted. If you don't like the current state of Iraq you should criticize the neocons who pushed for the invasion and who still clamor for the US to get involved in more wars in other countries like Syria and Iran.

The neocons have inflicted enormous harm on this country. Obama tends in general to be a rather passive president. He hasn't dug us that much deeper into a hole in the Middle East but he seems to have little interest in getting out of it.

Western elites are suffering from their own Newspeak: the ideas necessary for the policies that are necessary cannot be formed inside their heads, and if uttered by others cannot be understood or accepted. The disasters they have created abroad are harbingers of the disasters that await at home, which will be acted out over a longer timescale and which will cripple the West if they don't destroy it completely.